Door to door sales responsibilities are generally separated into geographic regions. Once fully subdivided, each geographical area is given to a sales team. The sales team then gives each salesperson a street or set of streets to work until complete. As there are a finite number of doors, it becomes important to contact as many of the people as possible without becoming a nuisance. Therefore it is important for management to know which houses have been contacted and which have not.
Door to door salespeople, however, have a more immediate motivation to sell. Paperwork is often seen as “in the way” or unimportant compared with moving along to the next door. After all, they will likely receive a new neighborhood to work on after this one has been finished. There is little motivation to provide records that may help the next salesperson through the current neighborhood.
The door to door sales process can be filled with frustrations. A potential customer may fail the credit check at the end of the sales call. Another potential customer may still be under a contract with another company. The current street may have been contacted in the last few months. Most of these frustrations equate with time wasted on poor sales prospects.
Frequently, door to door salespeople use paper to track their contacts. However, paper records are often difficult to read, difficult to review, time consuming to procure, and even contain misstatements. Even when management requires use of the paper records, the records may be filled out at the end of the day with guesses of what happened earlier that morning. The value of the paperwork is not directly related to the motivation of the door to door salesperson's next sale and therefore is given less attention than management would like.
Even with a good paper listing, management must take individual salesperson daily records and compile them into useful information. Not only is this time intensive work, but each salesperson's report is likely to be subjective at best, and fabricated at worst, such that the report must be interpreted by the person compiling the records. This time and fabrication barrier is likely the same barrier to having a salesperson review neighborhood records before selling in that neighborhood.